DECEMBER

Stockholm

A German publisher in exile, Bermann Fischer, publishes a German author in exile. Thomas Mann’s 600-page attempt to account for the moral catastrophe that overtook his native country, the novel Dr Faustus, comes out.

Thomas Mann sends the composer Arnold Schoenberg a copy of the novel dedicated to ‘the real one’.

Mann has quietly cultivated Schoenberg for years, to gather the material and the intellectual background he needs for the novel’s protagonist, a syphilitic composer. He has this fictional figure invent a method of composition like Schoenberg’s 12-tone technique, which he depicts as the outcome of a pact with the devil, a metaphor for the German people and their pact with Nazism.

Deeply offended, Arnold Schoenberg breaks off their acquaintance, but their quarrel becomes public. The ageing composer takes exception to his life’s work being attacked and politicised. Mann refers to him as ‘a contemporary composer’ and hopes he will regard the novel as an acknowledgement of his significance to modern music. But Schoenberg takes offence at this, too. ‘Of course, in two to three decades, one will know which of the two was the other’s contemporary.’

On 2 December, Schoenberg writes that art can clearly be interpreted as being Fascist, Bolshevist, left-wing, or right-wing, but music is music, art is art, and they have as little to do with freedom, equality, and fraternity as with totalitarianism.

Palestine

The first wave. Another way to describe the large numbers of people who are packing up their belongings amid gunfire and exploding bombs, under roofs where snipers lie in wait with loaded rifles.

Children and their schoolbooks, photographs, jewellery, a pipe, the infinite weight of days gone by, sensory impressions that have matured into experience. Keys on strings around their necks, on chains, keys that leave their lock, children who leave their games under rosebushes, children who leave doors and locks behind them and hang up the keys in their memories. Keys in hands, under dresses, on a chain around someone’s neck, on a cord, the key cold against the skin, as unnameable as grief.

On 4 December, Halissa becomes the first in a list of painful names, of abandoned olive trees and dusty roads, a list inscribed in stone, in the memories of the 750,000 people who will soon be in flight. It is followed by Haifa, Lifta, Al Mas’udiya, Mansurat al Kheit, Wadi ’Ara, Qisariya, Al Haram, Al Mirr, Khirbet al Manara, Al Madahil, Al ’Ulmaniya, ’Arab Zubeid, Al-Huseiniya, Tuleil, Kirad al Ghannama, Al ’Ubeidiya, Qumira, Kirad al Baqqara, Majdal, Ghuweir Abu Shusha, Khirbet Nasir al Din, Tiberias, Kafr Sabt, As Samra, Samakh, Ma’dhar, Hadatha, ’Ulam, Sirin, At Tira, ’Arab as Subeih, Beit Lahm, Umm al ’Amad, Yajur, Balad ash Sheikh, Arab Ghawarina, Deir Muheisin, Beit Jiz, Beit Susin, Deir Ayub, Saris, Al Qastal, Beit Naqquba, Qaluniya, ’Ein Karim, Al Maliha, Deir Yassin, the men killed in Deir Yassin.

A few months of accumulated names: the first wave of the first wave, the beginning of a beginning. The residents who leave behind everything but their keys are the first refugees. They flee, but never cease to look back. Never.

Paris

On 6 December, Simone de Beauvoir receives the first letter she has had for several weeks from Nelson Algren in Chicago. The postal strike is over at last, but what he writes worries her. He was attracted by a woman, but held back.

De Beauvoir is ambivalent. She wants him to feel free to do as he wishes, as long as he does not betray their love. Simone’s trust in his feelings is such that he can go to bed with other women if he wishes. On the other hand, her physical, sexual love for him is so strong that jealousy overcomes her. But she tries to distance herself through reason from what she calls the animal instinct, which cannot be allowed to take control. Allowing him the freedom to have another woman is a gift; his abstinence is also a gift. Nothing must ever become an obligation.

Deir Yassin

Numerous isolated and vulnerable Arab villages seek non-aggression pacts with the Haganah, the Zionist paramilitary movement.

The terrorists of the Stern Gang have abducted the leaders of a village called al-Shaykh Mu’annis. The threat of violence is constant. The villagers contact the Haganah’s Tel Aviv section, hoping for a reciprocal peace agreement. Haganah representatives have the abducted men released and talk to the village leaders, but no promises are made. The village, which lies on the coastal strip between Tel Aviv and Haifa, is allowed to remain where it is, the villagers to live where they live. For the time being.

Then there is Deir Yassin. A quiet village with around 700 inhabitants, a few kilometres west of Jerusalem. With the Haganah’s blessing, the villagers conclude agreements on peace and good neighbourliness with the two Jewish settlements of Giv’at Sha’ul and Montefiori. In return, the villagers promise not to shelter Arab insurgents.

But the agreement is a lie. The village is attacked. One hundred and thirty Zionist terrorists, defectors from the Irgun, raid the village with the Haganah’s support. The terrorists are given arms, ammunition, and back-up for the attack, designed to speed up the expulsion of the Arab population. It is clear that at least 110 people are murdered — men, women, and children — that corpses are thrown into wells, houses burned down, homes plundered, and villagers robbed of their belongings.

The soundwaves of the violence ripple outwards. Rumours become facts and facts rumours: pregnant women slit open; children and women raped, spat on, and stoned; men executed on the spot in their hundreds.

The Deir Yassin massacre lies a few months further on in the future, waiting to happen. The name will remain. Al-Nakba.

Moscow

No snow on the squares of Moscow, but good news. On 14 December, those Soviet citizens who can afford to go to the cinema see a newsreel announcing their latest victory on the post-war peaceful reconstruction front: a new currency system is being introduced and rationing is being lifted. The newsreel shows beaming men and women clapping their hands. A voiceover declares that the decision fills the people’s hearts with pride at their mighty Motherland and demonstrates to the world the immeasurable superiority of socialism over capitalism.

Inflation has accelerated at an ever-increasing pace after the war. Tomorrow, 15 December, is the day when all the money held by individuals, cooperatives, organisations, and institutions is to be exchanged. Five old roubles will become four new ones. A victory, says the cheerful newsreel voice. The people’s very last sacrifice, says the decree from the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

Up to now, Soviet citizens have been allowed a monthly ration of just 2 kg of meat, 500 g of sugar, 800 g of edible fats, 800 g of bread, and 1 kg of grain. Now rationing is over, and bread will be sold at the same price nationwide, it is promised. New prices will be set for all foodstuffs. Wheat flour and clothes will be cheaper, while the price of vodka will stay the same. Unlimited supplies of all kinds of meat will be available on the market.

On the new 100-rouble note, Lenin watches over his people.

Coburg

The publication Der Weg is one thing. But the European Fascists of the Malmö Movement have a platform of their own, named after the vision of British Fascist Oswald Mosley: Nation Europa.

It is founded by Arthur Ehrhardt, a former Waffen-SS colonel, in Coburg. The editorial board includes Per Engdahl, the Swiss Nazi Hans Oehler, and another former member of the Waffen-SS, the Dutchman Paul van Tienen.

To begin with, the main shareholder is the Swedish millionaire Carl-Ernfrid Carlberg. He will be followed by Werner Naumann, once State Secretary in Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda, as a major financier. Later, however, Oswald Mosley will take on the main responsibility for the magazine’s financial backing.

Mosley is a regular contributor to the publication and has a big influence on its orientation. The future is being built, a white bastion of visions: Europe for the Europeans.

The past is painstakingly laundered, the Waffen-SS undergoes a restoration of honour, and the genocide is persistently denied. British Intelligence describes Nation Europa as ‘having all the appearances of being the most dangerous piece of neo-Fascist propaganda put out since the war’.

There are many contributors. Some of the most significant ones appear in both Der Weg and Nation Europa. Per Engdahl writes, Bardèche, Priester, Hans Grimm, Johann von Leers, Hans Oehler, Julius Evola, and Jean-Marie Le Pen.

And so it continues. If one were to take a map of the world, set these men down in their respective places of refuge, and trace lines between their names, the lines would be so numerous, so close, so all-enveloping, that the world map would become as black as a Fascist’s shirt, an extinguished star.

Vienna

On 17 December, Paul Antschel is issued with an ID card from the refugee holding camp in Rothschild Hospital, Vienna. The representative of the International Committee for Jews from Concentration Camps and Refugees in Vienna notes that he is 1.68 m tall, weighs 62 kg, is 27 years old, has black hair and grey eyes. His signature confirms these facts in deep-black ink.

He is one of 3000 Romanian Jews from Bucharest fleeing from a Romanian Communist regime that seems to be turning more and more anti-Jewish, more and more menacingly unfree. The refugees leave on foot, passing through the Hungarian capital of Budapest on their way to Vienna. They sleep in derelict railway stations, bribe border guards, walk along a railway track that only a few years ago took their family members and friends to their deaths. Already there are some 200,000 refugees in Austria. Every rail sings of the present. All that gleams is due to wear.

Paul Antschel is a solitude among thousands of other solitudes, on their trudge through Europe. Many seek a home; he seeks a language.

He was born into a German-speaking family in Romania, speaks Romanian, English, French, Yiddish, and Russian, but German is the language in which he writes, thinks, creates poetry — and yet it isn’t. He survived years of slave labour in the army, spent 18 months as a prisoner in a labour camp in Tabaresti. His parents, Leo and Fritzi, were deported one month before him; his father died of typhus and his mother was shot in the head. He knows their end and it is his burden. As for his poems, he writes when he can. But how can one write in a language which the murderers use? How can that language belong both to the murderers and to him — at the same time? A German bullet through his mother’s head. How is he to write? His collected poems will be his way of trying to answer that question.

You see, I am trying to tell you there is nothing in this world for which a poet will renounce the writing of poetry, even if he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German.

In Berlin, the writer Hans Werner Richter carries his conception of the new German literature like an armful of bricks, ready to rebuild the ruin. He wants the German language to be reborn, to give a voice to those who grew up under Nazism, went to war, and starved in its name, tried to survive. The aim is a new realism free of euphemism: to find ‘the unreal behind the real, the irrational behind reality’. The new literature must begin here, and nowhere else. It must not look back. Gruppe 47 opens up for discussions, readings, and new voices.

In Vienna, the refugee Paul Antschel abides, his German poems a dance of death in words. His surname is spelt Ancel in Romanian: now he takes it and gives himself a name that is the same but different. In the same way, he takes the German language, but rearranges the words so he can continue to dwell in it. The pain remains, but he must find different means to express it, just as he must tell of sexual desire and the absence of the dead, like a bourdon droning through the days. He must speak of all this, but in a new way, newly invented. Ancel becomes Celan, his poems emerge in a different kind of German, he is a refugee and he is a poet.

A few years later, Paul Celan will visit Gruppe 47 in Berlin, seek solidarity and dialogue, read to Hans Werner Richter and the others, but leave the gatherings with feelings hurt and heart embittered. No place for he who turns inwards and looks back; no companionship offered to those seeking new words because the old words must be given a new meaning, or all the pain will have been for nothing.

How to bypass what happened? How to avoid hearing that no longer uttered? How to look ahead without catching the echo of silence? It is like killing the dead again, murdering the murdered again. Richter’s ruin is not Paul Celan’s.

Cairo

The clockmaker’s son can admire the West for its scientific progress — but the rest? Excessive individualism has pitted man against man, and class against class, says Hasan al-Banna. The emancipation of women undermines the family. Democracy has become one with capitalism and usury, and has failed to rid itself of its inbuilt racism. Communism, on the other hand, is absurdly materialistic, and the right to speak, think, and do business exists in name only. Predictable systems, without the hidden spaces where the wonder of life blooms, without proximity to the Creator of our world. Systems in which people are too preoccupied with things, money, and the body to abandon themselves to the miraculous and to submission.

The leader of the Muslim Brotherhood declares that greed, materialism, and oppression paralyse the people of the West, undermine the social order, and destroy relationships between nations. Humanity is tormented and wretched, its leaders are following Jewish prophets, and the time has come for the East to rise.

East is East and West is West, and between them lies Palestine. The proposal for dividing the region into two states makes Hasan al-Banna decry the US as the leading imperialist state, bought with Jewish gold. Once it was the British and the French that he attacked in anti-imperialism’s name, but from now on the United States becomes a target.

Next to weapons are words. Al-Banna and his successors will whet them, making them ever sharper in their struggle against the very concept of the West, as they see it.

A man who will pass on al-Banna’s heritage is Sayyid Qutb, who assumes the ideological leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood after Hasan al-Banna’s death.

‘The cultural invasion … makes Muslims ignorant of their religion and loads their minds with limited truths, then leaves their hearts a vacuum,’ writes Qutb.

He declares holy war on mental imperialism, which he considers more dangerous than the political and military varieties because it provokes no resistance. Rather, it penetrates people’s minds, creating illusions of a free world. So he aims his warheads at UNESCO and other Western bodies; he aims them at ‘the pens and tongues’ of democracy.

Sayyid Qutb is executed, considered a martyr, and attracts devoted followers. His thoughts lead on further; actions based on his thoughts lead on further. If you listen closely, you can hear devotees of violence account for murder and write the history of terror from then to now:

‘The Islamic state was drafted by Sayyid Qutb, taught by Abdullah Azzam, globalised by Osama bin Laden, transferred to reality by Abu Musab az-Zarqawi, implemented by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.’

Against the pens and tongues of democracy.

Buenos Aires

The Nazi magazine Der Weg is still a publication in its infancy that has not quite found its shape. But it has a dominant tone from the very first issue in 1947, and if you follow the magazine ten years into the future, you will see editor Fritsch’s firm hand steering it further and further into denying Nazi genocide. Article after article marshals statistics and population figures to argue that there are actually more Jews now than before the war. The magazine also describes how specific Jews are conspiring to take over the world.

After the fall of President Perón, the atmosphere in Buenos Aires will become less Nazi-friendly. The Grand Mufti Haj al-Husseini invites his friend Johann von Leers to Egypt, where a new Nazi colony has emerged. Together, they work on the third edition of the Grand Mufti’s book, Haqa’iq An Qadiyyat Filastin. The book is published by Karl-Heinz Priester of Wiesbaden, a close collaborator of Per Engdahl and one of the leaders of the Malmö Movement. Von Leers finds employment under President Nasser’s government. According to information obtained by the Swedish Security Service, he works at the Ministry of Propaganda, organising propaganda against Israel. Johann von Leers converts to Islam under the supervision of the Grand Mufti and takes the Arab name Omar Amin in homage to his friend.

The issue celebrating Der Weg’s ten-year anniversary will publish an ‘at home’ piece on the Grand Mufti, who receives the interviewer in his ‘tasteful little house in the elegant Cairo suburb of Heliopolis’. It will also publish a letter to the editor, printed in facsimile and signed by the Grand Mufti himself:

The fact that Der Weg has been appearing for ten years now is a source of great satisfaction to me. For ten years now, you have fought tirelessly for the freedom that is the natural right, with no exceptions, of each and every nation. Der Weg has always supported the Arabs in their struggle for freedom and their just combat against the forces of darkness embodied by world Jewry, which have dared to rob the Palestinian Arabs of their forefathers’ ancestral homeland and to steal their property. Sirs, may you continue the struggle for justice with undiminished strength, and may it be crowned with success.

New Delhi

After evening prayers at home in Birla House, people gather to receive spiritual guidance. Mahatma Gandhi again speaks of the catastrophe that is still unfolding, the agony of India, partition, and the violence against women. He often speaks of women, of those who are being abducted and raped to death. This evening, his address concerns those who have been enslaved but survived, those who have returned without noses or arms, with humiliating words carved into their foreheads and bodies. We must welcome them back, he repeats again and again on this warm evening of 26 December.

It is not a question of a mere ten or 20 girls. The number could be in hundreds or even thousands. Nobody knows. Where are all those girls? Muslims have abducted Hindu and Sikh girls … I have received a long list of girls abducted from Patiala. Some of them come from very well-to-do Muslim families. When they are recovered it will not be difficult for them to be returned to their parents. As regards Hindu girls it is still doubtful whether they will be accepted by their families. This is very bad. If a girl has lost her parents or husband it is not her fault. And yet Hindu society does not look upon such a girl with respect any more. The mistake is ours, not the girl’s. Even if the girl has been forced into marriage by a Muslim, even if she has been violated, I would still take her back with respect. I do not want that a single Hindu or Sikh should take up the attitude that if a girl has been abducted by a Muslim she is no longer acceptable to society. We should not hate her. We should sympathise with her and take pity on her … These girls are innocent.

Paris

Simone is anxious that her handwriting is harder to read than usual on 30 December. The red fountain pen Nelson gave her is broken and her writing uneven, yet she will not use any pen but this, her honeymoon gift.

The other gift, the most precious, the silver ring, is all right. I do not put the ring away for one minute. I like this secret sign of my belonging to you.

The love between Simone de Beauvoir and Nelson Algren will last for many more journeys, letters, and visits. But Nelson will end their relationship when he realises she will never leave Jean-Paul Sartre. They will maintain some sort of contact, although Simone will soon move in with Claude Lanzmann, 17 years her junior, and Algren will remarry his first wife. The ties will remain.

It is only when her autobiography, The Prime of Life, is published that Nelson Algren breaks off contact, hurt by what she has written about him. The silence between them will persist until his death in May 1981.

A few years later, on 14 April 1986, Simone de Beauvoir will be buried in the same grave as Jean-Paul Sartre in Montparnasse cemetery, Paris. On her finger will be the silver ring Nelson Algren gave her.

New York

Raphael Lemkin.

Did he know he ought to be remembered?

Did he know he would be forgotten?

He follows the Einsatzgruppen trial and simultaneously wages his war of writing to obtain the UN countries’ support for the Genocide Convention. The beautiful world with its beautiful humanity must be protected from its own ugliness.

For Lemkin, a social and economic attack on a minority — making it impossible for them to exist — is another form of genocide. Yet the Genocide Convention the UN ultimately adopts covers physical, biological killing — but not the killing of a culture. Trying to eliminate a group of people by forcibly displacing them, creating ghettoes, or imposing forced labour is not included. Nor is banning people from using their own language, forcibly assimilating them, or destroying their cultural heritage. Too many countries want to exclude these criteria; too many have grounds too good for wanting to avoid criminalising such actions.

Rather, the UN attaches great importance to Eleanor Roosevelt’s work on human rights. In this context, human rights are assigned to each unique individual, and this — together with the Genocide Convention — will give the world’s people greater protection than ever before. But in the end, this human rights document becomes a declaration, not a legally binding text.

It is easy to commit genocide, notes Raphael Lemkin, as no one wants to believe it can happen until it is too late. Out there, the world repeats ‘never again’. But Lemkin knows the history of genocide, he knows the logic it actually follows is ‘next time’. It has happened, so it can happen again.

The year is 1947. Lemkin has not yet read the final sentences of the Genocide Convention, which he is pushing through the UN on his own. He has no idea that he will be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize six times, but will never receive it. He knows nothing of his premature death, that he will drop dead at a bus stop in New York, ill with exhaustion, clasping a briefcase with a draft of his autobiography. Seven people will attend his funeral. Of all this he knows nothing.

Raphael Lemkin knows only that if the definition of the crime he has named is applied — if the murder of many can cause as much outrage as the murder of a single person — then the world will become a better place. And he signs his self-portrait in grief: ‘Above all that flies a beautiful soul who loves mankind and is therefore lonely.’